Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Presstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-14005452018-06-27T15:22:41-04:00Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.TypePadJeff Sessions’ Time of Tribulationtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833022ad3568891200c2018-06-27T15:22:41-04:002018-06-27T16:50:16-04:00By Karl Giberson | The emergence of “Trump Evangelicals” is baffling and confusing. The latest puzzle in what has become a political sideshow is Jeff Sessions’ ill-considered appeal to St. Paul—the primary source for Christian theology—in a futile attempt to mute the national outcry about the Trump administration’s decision to abuse immigrant children as a strategy to discourage immigrants from seeking to enter the United States illegally.Beacon Broadside

The emergence of “Trump Evangelicals” is baffling and confusing. The latest puzzle in what has become a political sideshow is Jeff Sessions’ ill-considered appeal to St. Paul—the primary source for Christian theology—in a futile attempt to mute the national outcry about the Trump administration’s decision to abuse immigrant children as a strategy to discourage immigrants from seeking to enter the United States illegally.

Sessions’ appeal to the “clear and wise command” of Paul was a mixture of naivete, cynicism, manipulation, and pseudo-Christian nonsense. The passage Sessions invoked comes from a letter that Paul wrote to a small congregation of Christians in Rome in the first century. He told his readers that they should all be “subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” Paul describes the governing authorities as “God’s servants” and commands submission to them as a “matter of conscience.”

This passage has been a cornucopia of confusion for centuries and, taken out of context, has been used by Christians to rationalize an astonishing range of offensive things, from the violent suppression of peasant revolts in sixteenth-century Germany to slavery in the American South. Now we find the attorney-general appealing to Trump’s white evangelical base to accept the abuse of children on our southern border on the grounds that God-ordained authorities are simply carrying out the law.

Evangelicals are far from monolithic theologically but, as a group, they have traditionally downplayed the importance of scholarship in understanding their faith, believing that God intended the Bible—which they view as inerrant—to be understood by a simple reading without the need for complex considerations of original languages, audience, and cultural context. This view of Scripture promotes “proof-texting”—the practice of lifting a short passage, often a single verse, from its context and using it to address an issue that would utterly baffle the original writer.

An astonishing 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and continue in their loyalty, despite Trump being the most overtly unchristian president in modern US history. They are the single largest religious group in America, at 17% of the population in 2016, down from 23% in 2006. Non-white evangelicals make up another 8% or so—a percentage that is increasing. Most of them voted against Trump.

Sessions was speaking language all too familiar to evangelicals in his simplistic decontextualized invocation of Paul’s admonition to obey authority.

The apostle Paul—one of the most brilliant and well-educated writers of his time and the author of much of the New Testament—cannot possibly have been suggesting that “all governing authorities, in all times, regardless of their policies, are ordained of God and should be obeyed.” No serious biblical scholar believes this, and a careful reading of Paul in context rules out Sessions’ interpretation, which is far from new. And, to my knowledge, no Christian in history has ever promoted this interpretation of Paul in the abstract, as a general principle. What has happened in practice, however, is that Christians appeal to this isolated verse when they need to defend an unjust law or questionable practice from attacks by progressive Christians who are arguing from a more holistic and informed perspective.

Martin Luther, to take one famous example, invoked Paul to justify the violent suppression of rebellious peasants who were pushing back against exploitive leaders in the sixteenth century; John Calvin, in remarkable contrast, highlighted an adjacent passage making the opposite point, where Paul states that legitimate authorities “hold no terror for those who do right.” Calvin argued that authoritarian rulers who terrorized their subjects—like the German leaders abusing Luther’s peasants— were thus illegitimate and justly opposed. Eighteenth century British loyalists quoted Paul to discourage the colonial rebellion against King George—after all, he was the king by divine decree! Rebels quoted Paul in their counterargument that British rule was illegitimate. Slaveholders and abolitionists both used these passages to make their diametrically opposed cases.

So what point was Paul making? Nobody knows. He may have been addressing an issue specific to his audience in Rome, suggesting restraint on the part of some unruly Christians—in which case the passage may have no meaning beyond that context. A great many things in the Bible are so contextual that they are simply not relevant today. There are prohibitions against eating shellfish, women speaking in church or going without head-coverings. The Israelites were forbidden to wear cloth sewn from more than one type of fabric, eat pork, or get tattoos. Some scholars think Paul suspected that Roman authorities would read his letter en route to delivery and the passage was for their eyes, to assuage concerns that the emerging Christian religion might pose a threat to the state. Some scholars believe that Paul did not even write this passage, and it was inserted later.

What we do know is that the controversial passage cannot possibly mean what Sessions presumably wanted it to mean—that Christians should tolerate widespread abuse of children simply because the abuse was at the hands of a duly elected government. Assuming Sessions believed his own argument—and I wonder about that—he was simply engaging in the common practice of reading personal values and beliefs into holy books, rather than being guided by the values and beliefs that come out of the book.

America’s holy book, the Bible, is an interpretive nightmare, which is why the denominations that try to follow it most closely—like Baptists—are constantly splintering over disagreements about what it means (there are hundreds of Baptist denominations). The Bible is a compilation of dozens of books, written in several languages, over many centuries, by very different people, writing to very different audiences, reflecting a great diversity of worldviews, and making a great many different points. A startling variety of things can be—and have been—defended by invoking the Bible. And often both sides of a dispute are quoting the Bible.

Sessions has been excoriated for his opportunistic appeal to Paul. His appeal, curiously, even runs counter to the beliefs of his own denomination, the United Methodists, where he is an active member. In fact the United Methodists are presently dealing with formal “church charges” that hundreds of Methodist leaders and laity have made against Sessions. He is accused of “child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination.” His interpretation of Paul is “contrary to the established standards of doctrines” of the United Methodist Church. The original letter that launched the investigation says “we deeply hope for a reconciling process that will help this long-time member of our connection step back from his harmful actions and work to repair the damage he is currently causing to immigrants, particularly children and families.” Sessions may be ejected from his denomination, unless he breaks rank with Trump over the treatment of immigrants.

This sordid episode highlights America’s schizophrenic religious personality and explains why Trump’s evangelical base remains faithful to him, despite his unchristian treatment of immigrants. The Trump evangelicals belong to a largely fundamentalist movement that emerged a century ago when traditional protestant Christians became alarmed about religious modernity, which was creeping into the established “mainline” denominations—the Methodists, the Episcopalians, the Anglicans. Religious modernity, to oversimplify, championed the social gospel of “loving one’s neighbor” and reaching out to “the least of these,” rather than traditional doctrines and beliefs like the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and miracles—beliefs that science and biblical scholarship were calling into question.

Defining itself over and against religious modernity, fundamentalism all but abandoned the social gospel as a watered down pseudo-Christianity. In time, the social gospel and even the phrase “social justice” came to be viewed with suspicion and hostility. Glenn Beck told his listeners that if they found the words “social justice” or “economic justice” on their church Web site, they should leave their church “as fast as you can.”

We are now at a point where America’s white evangelicals—as a group, with noted exceptions like Jim Wallis—simply have no idea how to relate their faith to issues of social justice. Most of them think social justice reeks of “leftism,” and cheer every time Trump ridicules it. Evangelicals would be baffled by a question about the moral and theological status of the people seeking entry to the US on our southern border. There exists no body of knowledge one could label “evangelical social teaching,” in contrast to the well-developed “Catholic social teaching,” that is quite clear on how we should respond to the desperate souls on our border.

Jeff Sessions stands astride this uniquely American theological divide. As Trump’s attorney general, he must pander to white evangelicals, emphasizing “law-and-order politics” over social justice, abusing brown children in the service of an agenda far removed from traditional Christianity. As a leader in the United Methodist Church, however, he must surely know better—and he may be forced to choose between his denomination or the policies of Donald Trump. His time of tribulation—a favored evangelical phrase—is just beginning.

The Best of the Broadside in 2016tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c8be5f59970b2016-12-27T17:28:46-05:002016-12-29T01:13:30-05:002016 is a year that speaks for itself. It’s been a rough and tumultuous one, culminating in a divisive presidential election that has many people afraid of what’s in store for the country once the new administration takes office on January 20. When we’re in need of wisdom and guidance during troubling and unpredictable times ahead, we turn to our authors, who continue to offer their time and insights to give us perspective and commentary on the condition of our world. Our blog, the Broadside, wouldn’t be what it is without them. As always, we’re so grateful to them. We’ll need their thought-provoking essays as we head into 2017. Before the year comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the Broadside’s most-read posts. Happy New Year!Beacon Broadside

Photo credit: Flickr user iluvgadgets

2016 is a year that speaks for itself. It’s been a rough and tumultuous one, culminating in a divisive presidential election that has many people afraid of what’s in store for the country once the new administration takes office on January 20. When we’re in need of wisdom and guidance during troubling and unpredictable times ahead, we turn to our authors, who continue to offer their time and insights to give us perspective and commentary on the condition of our world. Our blog, the Broadside, wouldn’t be what it is without them. As always, we’re so grateful to them. We’ll need their thought-provoking essays as we head into 2017. Before the year comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the Broadside’s most-read posts. Happy New Year!

In January, a group of armed militiamen, including Ryan and Ammon Bundy, broke into and took over the headquarters and visitors’ center of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. The reason for the take-over was to protest the imprisonment of two local rangers for committing arson on public lands in 2001 and 2006. The take-over, though, has more to do with the ongoing US system of colonialism and the illegal seizing land from Native communities. Providing some historical threads to understand the present, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls for all the sacred sites and “public” lands to be returned to the stewardship of Native peoples.

Before the rumors of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death were confirmed, he was already being lauded as a transformational figure, eulogized as a jurist who made originalism a respectable mode of constitutional interpretation. His views were regressive, but he expressed them in memorable prose. During oral argument, he made people laugh. Law professor David R. Dow argues, however, that Scalia’s interpretive philosophy is the equivalent of climate change denial. It will be forgotten in a generation and laughed at in two.

Ten years ago, rapper and producer Kanye West said “...I make Black History everyday, I don’t need a month.” It’s a declaration, says For White Folks Who Teach in the Hoodauthor Christopher Emdin, that signals the tensions between Black History Month and the youth to whom it should mean most. In his visits to classrooms, Emdin discovered that black students were disengaged from Black History Month celebrations because they didn’t feel connected to it. For them, it was a relic whose historical significance they recognized, but had no personal import. Emdin proposes a radical approach to making Black History Month relevant for the new generations.

Social media filled with outrage as well as tributes for Melissa Harris-Perry when MSNBC silenced her show and dismantled her editorial control. Her show was important, and for many viewers Harris-Perry was their first and often only national exposure to a broad range of issues. It raised uncomfortable, needed questions about American politics and enduring sites of injustice; it hosted a diverse array of experts for an informed national conversation. Jeanne Theoharis, who discussed her book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks on the show, celebrates Harris-Perry and the inclusive forum an entire nation lost.

Japan and the United States have differing cultural standards when it comes to parenting. That became apparent when seven-year-old Tanooka Yamato made international news as the boy whose parents abandoned him in the bear-infested forest of Hokkaido. Many Americans were incensed, fearing the worst that could have happened to the child and blaming his parents for negligence. But are we missing something as far as cultural differences are concerned? Suzanne Kamata, editor of Love You to Pieces and American expat who lives in Japan, addresses the other side of the story from the Japanese perspective.

In July, biblical literalist Ken Ham opened his controversial “Ark Encounter” theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. Here, visitors come in contact with a full-sized wood ark, built according to the dimensions provided by the Bible, and the events of the myth of Noah and the flood. Scientists have expressed concern about the project promoting pseudoscience. Biblical scholars have objected to the park’s treating the myth as a historical event. Karl Giberson, author of Saving the Original Sinner, argues that with the park, Ham has done a great disservice to Christianity and thinking people in general.

In Japan, there is still stigma attached to people with disabilities and they continue to be marginalized. This July, disabled residents died or sustained injuries by knife attack in a care facility, but their names were never made public. Police didn’t disclose their names on the grounds that their relatives did not want to have them identified due to their disabilities. In her second post about Japan, Suzanne Kamata points out that this is the opposite of what happened when a driver of a rampaging truck killed eighty-four people in Nice, France on Bastille Day. Names and photos of the truck victims were publicized. Kamata asks: How can we mourn those who are denied their humanity?

We’ve heard plenty about President-elect Donald Trump’s father during the course of his campaign, but not a word about his mother. That’s because, as Love & Fury author Richard Hoffman writes, women in Trump’s macho bully’s world are worth their fetishized bodies and nothing else. In fact, Trump’s inherited and antiquated brand of masculinity is designed to shame boys into rigid gender compliance and into identifying with a tangle of anxieties that can only be assuaged with violent behavior. But this ideology is on its way out. You can tell by the ferocious backlash of its death throes.

In response to the persistent racial injustice and the renewed spirit of activism represented by the Black Lives Matter movement, we released the eBook Baldwin for Our Times to help us understand and confront the inequalities in our times. This collection features specific selections from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and his poetry collection Jimmy’s Blues. We reached out to prominent Baldwin scholar Rich Blint to provide notes and an introduction for the publication. In this Q&A, Blint chats with us about the project and why Baldwin’s sharp and lucid social criticism will be imperative during the upcoming administration.

Why I Am Not Worried about Trump’s Education Secretary tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c8b8e440970b2016-12-05T15:37:47-05:002016-12-05T16:19:22-05:00by Karl Giberson
President-elect Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary has liberal pundits proclaiming that America’s educational sky is falling. DeVos is a prominent Michigan evangelical Christian, with ties to the Christian Reformed Church—the denomination that sponsors Calvin College in Grand Rapids which recently fired a professor for suggesting that Adam and Eve were not real people. DeVos is an advocate of school choice and has supported a voucher movement that now provides tax dollars for families in many states to send their children to private—and religious—schools. Is this not a dangerous person to preside over America’s public schools?Beacon Broadside

President-elect Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary has liberal pundits proclaiming that America’s educational sky is falling. DeVos is a prominent Michigan evangelical Christian, with ties to the Christian Reformed Church—the denomination that sponsors Calvin College in Grand Rapids which recently fired a professor for suggesting that Adam and Eve were not real people. DeVos is an advocate of school choice and has supported a voucher movement that now provides tax dollars for families in many states to send their children to private—and religious—schools. Is this not a dangerous person to preside over America’s public schools?

I don’t have much to say about the funding question, other than to note that we have years of experience with voucher programs now, and it is far from clear that they drain money from the public schools. In principle, a program that provided $7,500 vouchers for children in a school district that was spending $10,000 per pupil would save the public schools a lot of money. A Wisconsin study showed that this was exactly what happened in that state when the voucher program began.

My perspective comes from teaching science in religious colleges in the Boston area for over three decades. Two of them—Eastern Nazarene and Gordon—were moderate evangelical schools that taught evolution, but enrolled many students who came to college rejecting it. The third—where I was recently appointed the college’s first Professor of Science & Religion—is Stonehill, a liberal Catholic college, where anti-evolution is almost non-existent in the student body. All three institutions have significant constituencies of students educated in private religious secondary schools.

I have also been involved in the evolution controversy for much of my career, publishing hundreds of articles and several books on the topic, and speaking at colleges and universities around the country. My most recent book, with Beacon Press, was Saving the Original Sinner, on the controversy over Adam and Eve. The creationist website, Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, concluded their review of the book with “Shame on Karl Giberson.” I am no stranger to America’s troubled conversation about origins and I know first hand how it divides people.

In the first place, lots of religious schools don’t teach Ken Ham’s nonsense about origins (Ham is the brains behind the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and the recently opened Noah’s Ark park). Many schools, especially Catholic ones but even some evangelical schools, teach evolution as they do in public schools. Many such schools use the same textbooks and cover the topics in the same way. On the flip side, studies have shown that many public school teachers in conservative parts of the country simply ignore the topic of evolution to avoid controversy; some even teach creationism in violation of legal guidelines. They teach what they and their students already believe to be true and it all flies under the radar because nobody objects.

A few years ago, I spoke at a secular university in Texas, located not far from Louis Gohmert’s campaign headquarters. My host held a special dinner with students while I was there. She cautioned me before the event: “Don’t think, just because you are at a secular school, that the students accept evolution.” And she was right: Every one of the students was a young earth creationist. A secular education does not inoculate students against creationism.

Secondly, whatever is taught about origins in America’s schools is far less important than what is learned—and that is often remarkably little. Every year I poll my students on their experiences learning evolution. And every year I am amazed at how little they can recall about what they learned—and these are students from exceptionally strong schools in Massachusetts. Virtually none of them can place what they learned in a religious context and many simply did not even think about how the biology they were learning intersected with their religious beliefs. It is simply not the case that our nation’s high school graduates emerge with any sort of “indoctrination” on origins, one way or the other.

Even students that spend K-12 in strictly fundamentalist Christian schools that “protect” them from subversive ideas like evolution and gay marriage often migrate away from their parochial worldviews in college. In The Anointed, I tell the story of one of my students at Gordon College who was raised in a rigorously circumscribed southern Baptist environment that he was only too happy to abandon as a young adult. One of my present students at Stonehill College went to a fundamentalist high school in Massachusetts where the curriculum was essentially the young earth creationism promoted by Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. When I asked her why she would come to a liberal Catholic school like Stonehill, she said, “I learned creationism in high school and wanted to learn the other side so I can make up my own mind.” And, after a semester in my class, she has said goodbye to Ken Ham and his nonsensical ideas about origins.

It seems to me that the concerns about what Trump and DeVos might do to America’s schools are overblown. The worried pundits take an overly patronizing approach to our high school students in assuming they will uncritically embrace whatever they are taught; paradoxically, they also assume they will learn what they are taught. They ignore the myriad alternate sources of information and the influence of social media.

DeVos is certainly far less troubling than Jerry Falwell Jr., whose Liberty University rejects broad swaths of contemporary science. DeVos graduated from Calvin College, which has long been a leader in promoting evolution to conservative evangelicals (as long as it leaves room for Adam and Eve.) In fact, Calvin faculty have written some of the most aggressive criticisms of the anti-science of organizations like Liberty University and Answers in Genesis.

When all is said and done, DeVos is probably a reasonable match for the country as it stands today. We could do worse. And, if Falwell really was offered the job and turned it down as he says, we almost did.

Noah’s Ark Park Keeping Christians in the Eighteenth Centurytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d204dfb5970c2016-07-14T13:15:00-04:002016-07-13T17:03:32-04:00By Karl Giberson
The flamboyant creationist and enthusiastic biblical literalist Ken Ham has just opened his controversial and long-awaited “Ark Encounter” theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. At a cost of almost 100 million dollars, the park promises visitors—who pay $60 for admission—an encounter with “one of the greatest reminders we have of salvation.” In Ham’s view, Christians must accept all the stories in the Bible, no matter how fanciful, as literal history. Compromising on one Bible story compromises everything else.Beacon Broadside

The flamboyant creationist and enthusiastic biblical literalist Ken Ham has just opened his controversial and long-awaited “Ark Encounter” theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. At a cost of almost 100 million dollars, the park promises visitors—who pay $60 for admission—an encounter with “one of the greatest reminders we have of salvation.” In Ham’s view, Christians must accept all the stories in the Bible, no matter how fanciful, as literal history. Compromising on one Bible story compromises everything else.

Ham describes the Ark Encounter as a “one-of-a-kind historically themed attraction,” presenting “a number of historical events centered on a full-size, all-wood Ark.” The new project is an eighty-acre elaboration of the section of Ham’s equally ambitious Creation Museum—about forty miles away—dealing with the story of Noah’s Flood as described in Genesis.

A companion booklet details how the project faithfully reproduced the ark to match the descriptions the Bible says were provided to Noah by God. The resulting structure is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. (A cubit is an ancient measure based on the distance from an adult’s elbow to their fingertips, roughly 20 inches.) The Ark is thus more than one and a half football fields in length, making it, at least according to Ham, the “largest timber-frame structure in the world.”

Dogged by controversy since its conception, the project overcame many challenges. Tax incentives were controversial, given the organization’s view on LGBT hiring. Raising funds was a problem, solved partially by Ham’s high-profile debate with Bill Nye, who was an early visitor to the Ark Encounter. Scientists expressed concern about the promotion of pseudoscience. Biblical scholars objected to treating the myth of Noah’s flood as a historical event. Having overcome so many problems—which he views as the work of Satan—Ham now confidently states, “The Lord has worked mightily over the years to make this project a reality.”

The Ark Encounter is based on one of the grandest tales in Western Culture, although the 2014 Russell Crowe version was a bit flat. (Ham described it as “unbiblical, pagan” and “the worst film I’ve ever seen.”)

In the biblical account, God contacts a six-hundred-year-old man and warns him that an intolerably wicked human race will shortly be drowned in a great flood. Noah, being the only righteous man on the planet, is instructed by God to build a giant boat to save himself, his family, and two of every species. After the flood recedes, Noah’s righteous offspring and the animals he rescued will repopulate the earth with righteous humans.

The story of Noah’s Flood, more so than any other major story in the Bible, has been known for centuries to be impossible. Many lines of evidence make this clear. As far back as the seventeenth century’s great age of exploration, questions arose about how all the newly discovered animals could possibly have gotten to their existing locations if they were once on a boat that that docked in the Middle East. In Ham’s retelling, four thousand years ago there were just two kangaroos and both were located in Turkey, on Mt. Ararat where the ark came to rest. How did they hop across the ocean to Australia? And as explorers expanded the catalog of animals, it became clear they could not have fit in the ark, even if they could have gotten there.

Explorers soon discovered that the north and south poles could not have been under water just four thousand years ago. Once the height of the Earth’s great mountains was determined, calculations showed that there wasn’t enough water to cover them. Plants were discovered that could not have survived being submerged in salt water. The list goes on. The story of Noah’s Flood is simply not possible, and educated thinkers in the West began abandoning it more than three centuries ago.

Almost every new science that emerged in the wake of the Scientific Revolution created additional problems for the story. Evolution ruled out the possibility that all the races could have evolved from Noah’s family in just a few thousand years. Geneticists determined that the human race could never have consisted of just eight people. The discovery of continental drift showed that, by the time of Noah’s flood, the continents were in their present locations, making it impossible for the animals to have accomplished the necessary migration both onto the ark, and then back to their present locations.

These challenges to a literal reading of the story of Noah were the collateral damage of scientific progress, so much so that to insist today on the historicity of Noah’s flood requires the rejection of many mainstream scientific ideas. And yet Ham has spent $100 million dollars in a quixotic attempt to convince people that the story of Noah’s Flood is the central event in the history of our planet—the event that explains the origins of the mountains and the continents, the great canyons carved by rivers, the distribution of animals and human tribes.

Adding literary insult to scientific injury, nineteenth-century biblical scholars discovered ancient stories of other “Noahs” who were saved with the animals in a great boat. These stories predated the biblical version by centuries and were clearly its inspiration.

By the end of the nineteenth century, educated Christians were actively reexamining their tradition and seeking ways to free it from its pre-scientific worldview. This project took place on multiple fronts, but the most important involved the foundational stories in the early chapters of Genesis. In my book Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible’s First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World, I show how this played out in the story of Adam and Eve. The Noah story, interestingly, is a “reset” on Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, created righteous, fell into sin that became so bad that, within a few generations, God wanted to start over. The righteous Noah was that attempt and, like the first effort, failed miserably.

Ken Ham’s ambitious projects are sponsored by his organization, Answers in Genesis, with an annual budget of twenty million dollars. He believes that rejection of the historicity of the first chapters of the Bible undermines the social order that God set up in Eden—an order built explicitly on traditional male and female roles. In his view, the growing acceptance of gay marriage, gender complexity, and even women having careers of their own, is all based on the collapse of the authority of Genesis—an authority he wants to restore by convincing people that the story of Noah is real history at the Ark Encounter.

It’s a daunting task from a practical point of view, even setting aside the scientific challenges.

Ham seeks to convince his audience that Noah, with a crew consisting entirely of seven family members, cared for two of every species—he uses the uncertain biblical term “kind” in place of species—for over a year. Noah’s tiny crew fed the animals, watered them, cleaned up their waste, healed their illnesses. This strains credulity. Just the two elephants alone would have needed at least 15,000 gallons of fresh water—water that would have to be stored, since the water outside the ark would have been salty. And, not being refrigerated, the water would have to be prevented somehow from becoming contaminated.

Noah’s story, as a tale for children, has a certain adventurous charm, and I was fascinated by it as a kid in Sunday School. Much of that adventure came back to me when I visited Ham’s other project, the Creation Museum, a story I recount in Saving the Original Sinner. But I have to confess that I am horrified by the story as an adult and wonder why it took me so long to see just how horrifying the story is. Taken literally—the entire point of Ham’s new park—the story suggests that God drowned all the children on the planet for their parents’ sins. Even if we assume that all adults outside of Noah’s family were terrible sinners deserving to be drowned, the collateral damage in the deaths of innocent children and animals dwarfs every major genocide in history combined. If Noah’s story is literally true, God is a monster.

In convincing people that Noah’s Flood was a historical event, Ham has done a great disservice to Christianity and thinking people in general. To preserve the historicity of Noah’s story, almost all of contemporary science, biblical scholarship, and ancient history must be wrong. If there ever was a tail wagging a dog, this has to be it.

Perhaps, as Ham believes God once did, an offended deity will send another flood, this time to carry away Ham’s Ark, which I suspect will not float.

The Biblical Roots of Racismtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d1375592970c2015-07-13T16:43:36-04:002015-07-13T16:43:36-04:00By Karl Giberson Photo credit: Dave Bullock This blog appeared originally on Huffington Post Religion. The tragic shooting in South Carolina offers another painful reminder of American Christianity's troubled relationship with race and segregation. While it is true that most...Beacon Broadside

The tragic shooting in South Carolina offers another painful reminder of American Christianity's troubled relationship with race and segregation. While it is true that most of the great abolitionists were inspired by their Christian faith, it is also true that their opponents were inspired by their Christian faith. As a result, much contemporary racism is rooted in Christianity.

Unfortunately, the Bible is not very helpful when it comes to race issues. Many have found within its pages justifications for slavery, abuse of African-Americans and segregation. Unfortunately, the divisions between the races are exacerbated, not diminished, by Christianity.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in 1963, "It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning." Fifty years later, this remains true, as America's churches lag behind its schools, businesses, military and almost every other institution in escaping old taboos about mixing the races. Compare the diversity in the pages of Christianity Today to that of Sports Illustrated or Rolling Stone.

The single greatest humiliation of American Christianity is its long endorsement of slavery and even longer endorsement of racism—a dark cloud still clearly visible at eleven o'clock on Sunday mornings—a cloud that mocks the vision of Martin Luther King and the leaders of the civil rights movement.

Jones' warning shaped the university at an official level until recently and continues to shape it informally. The University has, however, officially rejected it racist heritage, and is struggling to free itself from its own bondage to a terrible ideology.

Bob Jones University is just one example of how American Christians have used the Bible to promote racism. When the Northern and Southern Baptists split in 1845 over the issue of slavery, Southern Baptists were using an obscure reference in Genesis to justify owning slaves—the so-called "Mark of Cain." In Genesis 4, we read of God placing a visible "mark" of some sort on Cain for murdering his brother and lying about it when God asked what had happened. As early as the fifth century, Cain's curse was interpreted as black skin, and millions of Christians have used it to justify slavery.

A bit later in Genesis, we read of Noah cursing his son Ham, declaring that his offspring would henceforth serve those of his brothers. The "Curse of Ham" was another Biblical justification for slavery. One particularly disturbing appeal to the Bible argued that Noah and his family on the ark were all white, so any blacks on the ark must have been among the animals.

Christian slave owners in the United States operated within a tradition that provided biblical justification for owning slaves in the same way that one owned horses. The arguments were varied: The Ten Commandments instruct us not to "covet our neighbor's manservant (= slave)," but make no comment about our neighbor owning a slave in the first place. We are also told not to covet his donkey. The great patriarch Abraham—Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith"—owned slaves. The apostle Paul returned a runaway slave to his master. Jesus did not condemn the widespread slavery in the Roman world. If slavery was wrong, why does the Bible not condemn it?

The prevailing view was, unfortunately, quite logical, or at least Biblical. If God created the races in their present forms, as most evangelical Christians believe and which must be true if the earth is just a few thousand years old, why did He create separate races? Assuming the separate races are a part of God's plan, should we not join Bob Jones Sr. in his warning that we must maintain God's divinely ordained races by preventing interracial marriage?

But as long as a literally interpreted Bible remains the authority for millions of Christians, we will be struggling with its mixed messages about the meaning of the races.

About the Author

Karl Giberson teaches science and religion at Stonehill College and is a leading voice in America’s creation/evolution controversy. He is the author of ten books, including Saving Darwin, a Washington Post “Best Book of 2008,” and The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, with Randall Stephens. He lives in Hingham, Massachusetts. He lives on the web at www.karlgiberson.com. Follow him on Twitter at @gibersok.

Fundamentalists Think Science Is Atheismtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c7a14179970b2015-06-23T15:40:38-04:002015-06-19T10:39:20-04:00By Karl Giberson This blog appeared originally in The Huffington Post. Equating science with atheism is one of the most dangerous byproducts of America's culture wars. This strange polarization portends disaster, as the country divides into factions that cannot find...Beacon Broadside

Equating science with atheism is one of the most dangerous byproducts of America's culture wars. This strange polarization portends disaster, as the country divides into factions that cannot find common ground on the way the world operates. And it goes without saying that there will be no agreement on what should be done when scientifically significant issues need political action.

In the book I show how Adam evolved from an obscure character in Jewish literature to the "Central Myth of the West," and now stands as an almost impenetrable barrier to millions of Christians accepting modern science.

Many Christians, unfortunately, believe their faith requires a "first man" who sinned and brought trouble on the world (feminists can thank two millennia of patriarchy for getting the "first woman" off the hook). The central Christian theme is "Creation-Fall-Redemption": God creates a perfect world; Adam "falls" by sinning, wrecks everything, and God curses the creation with death and suffering; and Christ redeems the world. In this picture Adam and Christ function as symmetrical "bookends": Adam breaks everything and Christ fixes it.

Adam and Eve thus stand on the bullseye of the controversy about evolution—a controversy that has taken on new urgency over the past few decades as the human genome has been mapped. This progress has established with near certainty that humans are closely related to chimps and bonobos, with whom they share a common ancestor; that the human race originated in Africa millennia before the events in Genesis took place; and that the human race never consisted of only two people. The conclusion is clear: The couple described in the opening pages of the Bible never existed—and thus could not have precipitated the disaster known as "The Fall."

Without Adam, the traditional formula that has long defined Christianity must be reinvented and many Christians are convinced that this is impossible. Millions of Americans would prefer to reject science, rather than bid farewell to the first man: "The denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair," warns the influential and widely followed Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler, "severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel."

I was reminded of the starkness of this division this week when the first discussion of my book began to appear. The journal Books & Culture ran an interview with me discussing the book and the first comment to appear was the following:

"All this is a good example of believing man's word instead of God's Word. That is, making a compromise with atheists."

If this were a single voice it could be ignored. But the sad reality is that this view runs through much of evangelical Christianity in America. It has taken up residence in the GOP, where denying various sciences—evolution, geology, climate science—has become a de facto requirement for election. Many evangelical colleges have it in their faith statement. Public school teachers find themselves embroiled in controversy simply teaching the material in the Biology text. Ken Ham's entire Answers in Genesis project is based on it. The starting point for so many Christian has become the absolute truth of a particular interpretation of the Genesis creation story. And any alternative viewpoint is now understood to be a "compromise with atheists."